The World According To Garp (67 page)

God knows what happened to Pooh.

Helen and Garp fixed up the old Steering mansion, as it was called by many in the school community. The name Percy faded fast; in most memories, now, Midge was always referred to as Midge Steering. Garp’s new home was the classiest place on or near the Steering campus, and when the Steering students gave guided tours of the campus to parents, and to prospective Steering students, they rarely said, “And this is where T. S. Garp, the writer, lives. It was the original Steering family house, circa 1781.” The students were more playful than that; what they usually said was, “And this is where our wrestling coach lives.” And the parents would look at one another politely, and the prospective student would ask, “Is wrestling a
big
sport at Steering?”

Very soon, Garp thought, Duncan would be a Steering student; it was an unembarrassed pleasure that Garp looked forward to. He missed Duncan’s presence in the wrestling room, but he was happy that the boy had found his place: the swimming pool—where either his nature or his eyesight, or both, felt completely comfortable. Duncan sometimes visited the wrestling room, swaddled in towels and shivering from the pool; he sat on the soft mats under one of the blow heaters, getting warm.

“How you doing?” Garp would ask him. “You’re not wet, are you? Don’t drip on the mat, okay?”

“No, I won’t,” Duncan would say. “I’m just fine.”

More frequently, Helen visited the wrestling room. She was reading everything again, and she would come to the wrestling room to read—”like reading in a sauna,” she often said—occasionally looking up from what she was reading when there was an unusually loud slam or a cry of pain. The only thing that had ever been hard for Helen, about reading in a wrestling room, was that her glasses kept fogging up.

“Are we already middle-aged?” Helen asked Garp one night in their beautiful house, from the front parlor of which, on a clear night, they could see the window squares of light in the Jenny Fields Infirmary; and look over the green-black lawn to the solitary night light above the door of the infirmary annex—far away—where Garp had lived as a child.

“Jesus,” Garp said. “Middle-aged? We are already
retired
—that’s what we are. We skipped middle age altogether and moved directly into the world of the
elderly
.”

“Does that depress you?” Helen asked him, cautious.

“Not yet,” Garp said. “When it starts to depress me, I’ll do something else. Or I’ll do
something
, anyway. I figure, Helen, that we got a head start on everyone else. We can afford to take a long time-out.”

Helen grew tired of Garp’s wrestling terminology, but she had grown up with it, after all; it was water off a duck, for Helen Holm. And although Garp wasn’t writing, he seemed, to Helen, to be happy. Helen read in the evenings, and Garp watched TV.

Garp’s work had developed a curious reputation, not altogether unlike what he would have wanted for himself, and even stranger than John Wolf had imagined. Although it embarrassed Garp and John Wolf to see how politically
The World According to Bensenhaver
was both admired and despised, the book’s reputation had caused readers, even if for the wrong reasons, to return to Garp’s earlier work. Garp politely refused invitations to speak at colleges, where he was wanted to represent one side or another of so-called women’s issues; also, to speak on his relationship to his mother and her work, and the “sex roles” he ascribed to various characters in his books. “The destruction of art by sociology and psychoanalysis,” he called it. But there were an almost equal number of invitations for him simply to read from his own fiction; an occasional one or two of these—especially if it was somewhere Helen wanted to go—he accepted.

Garp was happy with Helen. He wasn’t unfaithful to her, anymore; that thought seldom occurred to him. It was perhaps his contact with Ellen James that finally cured him of ever looking at young girls in that way. As for other women—Helen’s age, and older—Garp exercised a willpower that was not especially difficult for him. Enough of his life had been influenced by lust.

Ellen James, who was eleven when she was raped and untongued, was nineteen when she moved in with the Garps. She was immediately an older sister to Duncan, and a fellow member of the maimed society to which Duncan shyly belonged. They were so close. She helped Duncan with his homework, because Ellen James was very good at reading and writing. Duncan interested Ellen in swimming, and in photography. Garp built them a darkroom in the Steering mansion, and they spent hours in the dark, developing and developing—Duncan’s ceaseless babble, concerning lens openings and light, and the wordless
oooh’s
and
aaah’s
of Ellen James.

Helen bought them a movie camera, and Ellen and Duncan wrote a screenplay together and acted in their own movie—the story of a blind prince whose vision is partially restored by kissing a young cleaning woman. Only one of the prince’s eyes is restored to sight because the cleaning woman allows the prince only to kiss her on the cheek. She is embarrassed to let anyone kiss her on the lips because she has lost her tongue. Despite their handicaps, and their compromises, the young couple marries. The involved story is told through pantomime and subtitles, which Ellen wrote. The best thing about the film, Duncan would say later, is that it’s only seven minutes long.

Ellen James was also a great help to Helen with baby Jenny. Ellen and Duncan were expert baby-sitters with the girl, whom Garp took to the wrestling room on Sunday afternoons; there, he claimed, she would learn to walk and run and fall without hurting herself, although Helen claimed that the mat would give the child the misconception that the world underfoot felt like a barely firm sponge.

“But that is what the world
does
feel like,” Garp said.

Since he had stopped writing, the only ongoing friction in Garp’s life concerned his relationship with his best friend, Roberta Muldoon. But Roberta was not the
source
of the friction. When Jenny Fields was dead and gone, Garp discovered that her estate was tremendous, and that Jenny, as if to plague her son, had designated
him
to be the executor of her last wishes for her fabulous loot and the mansion for wounded women at Dog’s Head Harbor.

“Why
me?
” Garp had howled. “Why not
you?
” Garp yelled at Roberta. But Roberta Muldoon was rather hurt that it
hadn’t
been her.

“I can’t imagine. Why you, indeed?” Roberta admitted. “Of all people.”

“Mom was out to get me,” Garp decided.

“Or she was out to make you
think
,” Roberta suggested. “What a good mother she was!”

“Oh boy,” Garp said.

For weeks he puzzled over the single sentence that stated Jenny’s intentions for the spending of her money and the use of her enormous seacoast house.

[_I want to leave a place where worthy women can go to collect themselves _]and just be themselves, by themselves.

“Oh boy,” Garp said.

“A kind of foundation?” Roberta guessed.

“The Fields Foundation,” Garp suggested.

“That’s terrific!” Roberta said. “Yes,
grants
for women—and a place to go.”

“To go do
what?
” Garp said. “And grants
for
what?”

“To go get well, if they have to, or to go be by themselves, if that’s what they need,” Roberta said. “And to write, if that’s what they do—or paint.”

“Or a home for unwed mothers?” Garp said. “A
grant
for “getting well”? Oh boy.”

“Be serious,” Roberta said. “This is important. Don’t you see? She wanted
you
to understand the need, she wanted you to have to deal with the problems.”

“And who decides if a woman is “worthy”?” Garp asked. “Oh boy, Mom!” he cried out. “I could wring your neck for this shit!”

“
You
decide,” Roberta said. “
That’s
what will make you think.”

“How about
you?
” Garp asked. “This is your kind of thing, Roberta.”

Roberta was clearly torn. She shared with Jenny Fields the desire to educate Garp and other men concerning the legitimacy and complexity of women’s needs. She also thought Garp would be rather terrible at this, and she knew she would do it very well.

“We’ll do it together,” Roberta said. “That is, you’re in charge, but I’ll advise you. I’ll tell you when I think you’re making a mistake.”

“Roberta,” Garp said, “you’re
always
telling me I’m making a mistake.”

Roberta, at her most flirtatious, kissed him on the lips and clubbed him on the shoulder—in both cases, so hard that he winced.

“Jesus,” Garp said.

“The Fields Foundation!” Roberta cried. “It’s going to be wonderful.”

Thus was
friction
kept in the life of T. S. Garp, who without friction of some kind would probably have lost his senses and his grip upon the world. It was friction that kept Garp alive, when he wasn’t writing; Roberta Muldoon and the Fields Foundation would provide him with friction, at the very least.

Roberta became the in-residence administrator of the Fields Foundation at Dog’s Head Harbor; the house became, all at once, a writers’ colony, a recovery center, and a birth-advisory clinic—and the few well-lit garret rooms provided light and solitude for painters. Once women knew that there was a Fields Foundation, there were many women who wondered who was eligible for aid. Garp wondered, too. All applicants wrote Roberta, who assembled a small staff of women who alternately liked and disliked Garp—but always argued with him. Together, twice a month, Roberta and her Board of Trustees would assemble in Garp’s grouchy presence and choose among the applicants.

In good weather they sat in the balmy side-porch room of the Dog’s Head Harbor estate, although Garp increasingly refused to go there. “All the weirdos-in-residence,” Garp told Roberta. “They remind me of other times.” So then they met at Steering, in the Steering family mansion, the wrestling coach’s home, where Garp felt slightly more comfortable in the company of these fierce women.

He would have felt
more
comfortable, no doubt, to have met them all in the wrestling room. Though even there, Garp knew perfectly well, the former Robert Muldoon would have made Garp struggle for his every point.

Applicant No. 1,048 was named Charlie Pulaski.

“I thought they had to be
women
,” Garp said. “I thought there was at least
one
firm criterion.”

“Charlie Pulaski
is
a woman,” Roberta told Garp. “She’s just always been called Charlie.”

“I should say that was enough to disqualify her,” someone said. It was Marcia Fox—a lean, spare poet with whom Garp frequently crossed swords, although he admired her poems. He could never be that economical.

“What does Charlie Pulaski
want?
” Garp asked, by rote. Some of the applicants only wanted money; some of them wanted to live at Dog’s Head Harbor for a while. Some of them wanted lots of money
and
a room at Dog’s Head Harbor, forever.

“She just wants money,” Roberta said.

“To change her name?” asked Marcia Fox.

“She wants to quit her job and write a book,” Roberta said.

“Oh boy,” said Garp.

“Advise her to keep her job,” said Marcia Fox; she was one of those writers who resented other writers, and would-be writers.

“Marcia even resents
dead
writers,” Garp told Roberta.

But Marcia and Garp both read a manuscript submitted by Ms. Charlie Pulaski, and they agreed that she should hold on to whatever job she could get.

Applicant No. 1,073, an associate professor of microbiology, wanted time off from her job to write a book, too.

“A novel?” Garp asked.

“Studies in molecular virology,” said Dr. Joan Axe; she was on leave from the Duke University Medical Center to do some research of her own. When Garp asked her what it was, she had told him, mysteriously, that she was interested in “the unseen diseases of the bloodstream.”

Applicant No. 1,081 had an uninsured husband who was killed in a plane crash. She had three children under the age of five and she needed fifteen more semester hours to complete her M.A. degree, in French. She wanted to go back to school, get the degree, and find a decent job; she wanted money for this—and rooms enough for her children, and for a baby-sitter, at Dog’s Head Harbor.

The Board of Trustees unanimously decided to award the woman sufficient money to complete her degree and to pay a live-in baby-sitter; but the children, the babysitter,
and
the woman would all have to live wherever the woman chose to complete her degree. Dog’s Head Harbor was
not
for children and baby-sitters. There were women there who would go crazy upon the sight or sound of a single child. There were women there whose lives had been made miserable by baby-sitters.

That was an easy one to decide.

No. 1,088 caused some problems. She was the divorced wife of the man who had killed Jenny Fields. She had three children, one of whom was in a reform school for preteens, and her child-support payments had stopped when her husband, Jenny Fields’ assassin, was shot by a barrage from the New Hampshire State Police and some other hunters with guns who had been cruising the parking lot.

The deceased, Kenny Truckenmiller, had been divorced less than a year. He’d told friends that the child support was breaking his ass; he said that women’s lib had screwed up his wife so much that she divorced him. The lawyer who got the job done, in favor of Mrs. Truckenmiller, was a New York divorcee. Kenny Truckenmiller had beaten his wife at least twice weekly for almost thirteen years, and he had physically and mentally abused each of his three children on several occasions. But Mrs. Truckenmiller had not known enough about herself, or what rights she might possibly have, until she read
A Sexual Suspect
, the autobiography of Jenny Fields. That started her thinking that perhaps the suffering of her weekly beatings, and the abuse of her children, was actually Kenny Truckenmiller’s fault; for thirteen years she had thought it was
her
problem, and her “lot in life.”